Recently, a camera module is generally installed on a compact electronic device such as a mobile telephone, and the camera module has been demanded to be made smaller.
Conventionally, this camera module requires, for example, a lens barrel and a lens holder which support the lens, a holder which supports an infrared (IR) cut filter, a housing that holds a laminated body made up of a substrate, an image capturing element, and an optical element, a resin which seals the laminated body, and the like. Therefore, when the above multiple parts are made smaller, it has not been easy to make a camera module by precisely combining the multiple parts.
Then, a technique is proposed in which a substrate, a semiconductor sheet formed with multiple image capturing elements and a lens array sheet formed with multiple image capturing lenses are attached with resin layers interposed therebetween to form a laminated member, and the laminated member is subjected to dicing, to complete individual camera modules (e.g., Patent Document 1, etc). Further, a technique is also proposed in which an image sensor wafer formed by arranging a plurality of image sensor chips in a matrix state, a lens array formed by integrating a plurality of lenses, an IR filter glass, and a diaphragm film are integrally attached in this order to form a structure and the structure is cut along the boundary of the image sensor chips, to complete individual camera modules (e.g., Patent Document 2, etc).